Dome Content Delivery is Changing

One of the areas where “new media” and the digital age are making a big change is in the domed theater — more commonly known as the planetarium theater — where astronomy and space science have always reigned. I’ve worked in the creation of fulldome/planetarium content for a number of years. And, I have written about this change before. Part of it is fueled by changes in technology. Today we can put stuff up on the dome using video projection systems and opto-mechanical planetarium projectors in combination or apart from each other. Imagery is available to us digitally and it doesn’t have to be made into film-based media to be delivered. In a few years’ time, the classic slide-film-based way of doing things could well be obsolete — although it is, to quote the old Monty Python line, “not dead yet.”

There is a lot of discussion in the planetarium/fulldome video world about how the new technology is going to influence (or is influencing) the content. It’s a fair question, and I think there are several answers you could supply. One is that the dome is still being used to teach astronomy, to bring the wonders of the universe to mass audiences. In that case the delivery system doesn’t really matter. You CAN do it with slides and a live lecturer, PowerPoint (in the dome?), or video delivery systems. The story is the story is the story.

If you posit that the dome is an immersive medium as well, you can still do immersivity with slides, which is what we’ve done for years, but it looks better when you use video to “paint” your dome. However, lovely immersive visualizations are incomplete without a story, no matter how they’re delivered.

You could say that the content of fulldome can be anything — from an exploration of the universe at large to a trip through the human body or an exploration of the microworld (atoms, molecules, quarks, etc.).  You can still do that with slides, although much better to be done through video.  Still depends on telling a good story.

I think you can see where this is going.  Like all other forms of media (new, old, really old, really new), the content — the story you want to tell is what’s going to carry the day.  The delivery system is important, and in the dome, the trend is toward fulldome video presentations.  That’s the wave of the future, but in one sense, the fundamentals remain strong — the story is paramount.